Synthesis And Characterization Of Nanozirconia By Surfactant-assisted Route

The nanotechnology is a new advanced subject which was developed from the end of 1980s to the 1990s. The people' cognition of world has been greatly expanded and reinforced by the nanotechnology. People can produce materials and device at the molecule and atom level by he nanotechnology. Recently more and more interests have been focused on the nanotechnology because it can innovate production technology and produce new materials and new production. The fast development of the nanotechnology will lead to a thoroughly innovation covered all industry field at the 21th century. Nanomaterials is a kind of superfine which has the particle size from the 0.1nm to 100nm, and it lied in the conjunction field of atom family and macrography materials. Nanomaterials has many physical and chemical unique characteristic compared to not only molecule and atom materials but also macrography materials because the nanomaterials have different particle size compared to normal materials. Zirconia is a metal oxide material which has high melting-point (2700 ℃ ), high boiling point, small coefficient of heat conductivity, great coefficient of thermal expansion, resistant to high temperature, good wear-resistance, corrosion resistance. Zirconia has been used in electron and new material industry, even in the department of metallurgy, chemical industry, glass, medicine and soon. Nanozirconia has small particle size and may exhibits many different properties of quantum size effect, surface effect, and small dimension compared to massive materials. So zirconia nanomaterials have super physical and chemical properties and have broad application prospect. There are many methods to synthesize zirconia nanocrystallites such as alkoxide decomposition, homoprecipitation, sol-gel, hydro-thermal method and so on. All methods have themselves advantages and disadvantages. The preparation technology of hydro-thermal method is simple and small grain size and few conglobation were observed through the preparation, so this method is widely used in the synthesis of nanophase materials. In this papers, different structural zirconia nanocrystallites have been successfully synthesized by the direction and the self-assembly of cationic surfactant (CTAB) and anionic surfactant (SDS) under the hydro-thermal method; At the same time, the behaviers of zirconia after incorporation by doping aluminium, cerium and yttrium was studied. XRD, TEM, EDS, Uv-vis and N2 adsorption-desorption analysis were used for the structural characteristics. The results show that the cationic surfactant has a distinct direction effect on the formation of zirconia nanocrystallites. The zirconia nanocrystallites with both tetragonal and monocline phase were obtined by the cationic surfactant after calcination at 500℃ , and the particles with uniform ellipse shape have small particle size about 15nm. The zirconia nanocrystallites with pure tetragonal phase and worm mesoporous structure were obtined by the anionic surfactant after calcination at 500℃. Zirconia nanocrystallites of tetragonal structure with small particle size were also obtined by doping metallic ion (aluminium, cerium and yttrium) after calcination at 500℃ . The temperature range of thermal stabilization of zirconia was raised by the doping metallic ion from the XRD analysis. A little of mesoporous structure were observed from the N2 adsorption-desorption and TEM analysis which show cationic surfactant have obvious self-assist effect during the synthesis of zirconia nanocrystallites.